by Brian Fremeau

The No. 1 team in the country according to FEI is scoring 52 points per game (fifth most nationally) and 4.2 points per possession (second most nationally). Its offense leads the nation in explosive drive percentage (31.1 percent) and points per ordinary drive (2.7), ranks second in value drive percentage (67.4 percent), and third in available yards percentage (66.4 percent). There’s no dispute that West Virginia has one of the most dangerous offenses in college football.

The Mountaineers have also given up 108 points in the last two games and rank 112th overall in raw defensive efficiency and 111th overall in special teams efficiency. Can West Virginia truly be the nation’s best team if it only plays exceptionally well in only one of three phases of the game? It certainly doesn’t seem likely to be sustainable.

The primary reason West Virginia ranks first overall is tied up in a bit of circular logic. There are five teams from the Big 12 ranked among the top 10 in this week’s FEI ratings (including West Virginia’s last two opponents, No. 6 Texas and No. 9 Baylor) and four others rank among the top 30. Aside from Kansas, conference collectively beat down on its non-conference opponents in such efficient fashion that they are all receiving a collective boost by having played a couple of games apiece against one another. With even more to come –- the conference plays a round-robin schedule -– FEI may continue to reward the league, though I expect there will eventually be some separation.

What’s interesting to me is that while FEI thinks very highly of the league, it doesn’t think very highly of the league’s chance to send a team to the BCS championship game. Only West Virginia and Oklahoma are projected to win more than five more games the rest of the way, meaning FEI thinks that only the Mountaineers will get to double-digit victories by season’s end. FEI says that teams in other conferences have a better chance to get to 10 or more wins: Alabama, Oregon, Florida, Florida State, and Notre Dame.

A very intriguing strength of schedule debate may present itself over the course of the coming months. It seems blasphemous to suggest that an SEC team may not have a schedule strength argument, but Alabama has the 78th-toughest regular season schedule according to current FEI ratings, weaker than traditional AQ conference schedules and much weaker than traditional SEC schedules. Alabama’s dominance of its schedule, however weak, will make this a non-issue, but in a scenario in which 1-loss teams will need to be parsed, the SEC may actually hold the Crimson Tide back.

This is the final week in which preseason data is still used as a component in the FEI ratings. Starting next week, preseason data will be eliminated, and we will debut the complete offensive, defensive, and special teams opponent-adjusted ratings for all teams. Let the arguments begin.

Week 6 Revisionist Box Scores

This weekly feature identifies the games played each week that were most impacted by turnovers, special teams, field position, or some combination of the three. The neutralized margin of victory is a function of the point values earned and surrendered based on field position and expected scoring rates.

2012 totals to date:

• Net Total Turnover Value was the difference in 47 of 287 FBS games (16.4 percent)
• Net Special Teams Value was the difference in 22 of 287 FBS games (7.7 percent)
• Net Field Position Value was the difference in 32 of 287 FBS games (11.1 percent)
• Turnovers, Special Teams and/or Field Position was the difference in 65 of 287 FBS games (22.6 percent)

2012 Game Splits for all teams, including the offensive, defensive, special teams, field position, and turnover values recorded in each FBS game are provided here.

FEI Week 6 Top 25

The Fremeau Efficiency Index (FEI) rewards playing well against good teams, win or lose, and punishes losing to poor teams more harshly than it rewards defeating poor teams. FEI is drive-based and it is specifically engineered to measure the college game.

FEI is the opponent-adjusted value of Game Efficiency (GE), a measurement of the success rate of a team scoring and preventing opponent scoring throughout the non-garbage-time possessions of a game. FEI represents a team's efficiency value over average. Strength of Schedule (SOS) is calculated as the likelihood that an "elite team" (two standard deviations above average) would win every game on the given team's schedule. SOS listed here includes future games scheduled.

Mean Wins (FBS MW) represent the average total games a team with the given FEI rating should expect to win against its complete schedule of FBS opponents. Remaining Mean Wins (FBS RMW) represent the average expected team wins for games scheduled but not yet played.

Offensive Efficiency (OE) is the raw unadjusted efficiency of the given team's offense, a measure of its actual drive success against expected drive success based on field position. Defensive Efficiency (DE) is the raw unadjusted efficiency of the given team's defense, a measure of the actual drive success of its opponents against expected drive success based on field position. Field Position Advantage (FPA) is the share of the value of total starting field position earned by each team against its opponents.

Only games between FBS teams are considered in the FEI calculations. Since limited data is available in the early part of the season, preseason projections are factored into the current ratings. The weight given to projected data will be reduced each week until Week 7, when it will be eliminated entirely. Opponent-adjusted offensive and defensive FEI ratings will also debut in Week 7.

These FEI ratings are a function of results of games played through October 6. The ratings for all FBS teams can be found here.

Posted by: Brian Fremeau on 11 Oct 2012

8 comments, Last at 12 Oct 2012, 5:50pm by cfn_ms